My personal feeling -- and I fear a very reasonable one -- is that Assad will play every trick in the book, and that his ally Putin will only fault him with if he commits the crime of getting provably caught. Only if there is substantial proof of his chicanery, not just doubt about his actions or an a practical inability to verify full compliance -- or even unsubstantiated evidence, would Obama at this point have the freedom to act militarily. However, failure or not, the very events leading here helps set up multi-pole solution precedent--spreading out towards full global balancing on action, as it were a global round table monitoring itself. "Chicanery" will itself stop as the players find themselves evermore locked in by the overriding global reality. Its as it were this great global gear driven mechanism coming together with components spinning wildly--the teeth collision and friction is a great danger to the whole mechanism exploding. But if even for local-interest reasons, certain groups of large gears -- particularly the most mutually opposing -- find themselves forced to slow a bit and coordinate a lock-in, this may ease the way for a safe lock-in for the whole system. And whether these gears are sincere or not, they will slowly come to realize the enormity of the mechanism surrounding them that has now locked them in through a surprising number of overlapping "lock-step" factors. What they entered into so "trivially," may not ever let them out. -- And good thing for that as it may save the world.

I fully agree.
And it does not really matter what happened behind the scenes, who truly initiated the process, who saved whom, the important thing is that now both Russia and the US are engaged, and Syria cannot rely on anybody letting them off the hook.
But the most crucial thing is as the article hints too, hopefully this agreement can serve as a milestone for wider, deeper, mutual cooperation not only between 2-3 "main players" but all over the globe.
In our new, global, interdependent human system there are no regional, local conflicts thus all solutions have to be globally, mutually responsible and complementing.

After nearly going down in flames, the President's Syria policy has apparently been saved from the abyss by an offhand remark by Secretary of State Kerry and an opportunistic move by Putin.

This will be "spun" in many directions by all sides on the debate, including this commentary, but hopefully it has moved the situation in a positive diplomatic direction and will eliminate the threat of further use of chemical weapons in Syria and reassert the international norm against their use.

That said, this strategy is not without risk. It does nothing to end the civil war in Syria, which will likely end with a reassertion of the Assad dictatorship and a stronger regional presense for Iran, or an extremist Islamic regime aligned with Jihadists. While the threat of the use of chemical weapons will hopefully be taken off the table in Syria, it does nothing to deal with the larger issues across a 5000 mile wide swath from Northern Pakistan through Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, Syria, Egypt and across Northern Africa as the terrorist attack on a Kenyan mall vividly demonstrates.

If the move is effective in eliminating most chemical weapons in Syria and preventing their further use, it will be a small diplomatic victory for the President and Putin. That said, it does nothing to address the larger issues across the Middle East and North Africa that will continue to manifest in domestic conflict, regional geopolitical jockeying and resurgent international terrorism for decades to come.

In a larger sense, it is representative of America's weakened position in the region after more than a decade of war and the withdrawal from Iraq and the pending withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as the Presidents weakness at home on both sides of the aisle. While the wisdom of past interventions can be endlessly debated, what seems clear is that the U.S. is significantly weaker in the region and the forces of violence, including extremist violence, are ascendant.

While the norm against state actors using chemical weapons has hopefully been reasserted, the template for non-state actors, who by definition dont respect international norms, has been cast.

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